Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Data centers sometimes rely upon computing systems having multicore chips to run servers. With the current rate of technology scaling, the number of cores that can be integrated into each multicore chip may double about every two to three years. While this rate is expected to begin decreasing, the number of cores that can be included in a multicore chip can be expected to continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
With the ever-increasing number of cores in multicore chips, one challenge is the power usage of each core. In particular, the threshold voltage of the cores can reach a point at which further downscaling may be impossible without increasing static power consumption of the chips. Thus, one way to further increase efficiency and/or power of multicore processors may be to improve the energy efficiency of the cores.